So.. the kids have installed Spotify premium on their phones, forgotten their login details and are now costing me £9.99 per month recurring. Spotify can’t (won’t) help as you need to log in to Spotify to cancel the subscription. Here is a solution: Go to https://customer.boku.com/login and type in your phone number, then click on “Need a pin code?” Click... Read More

Now my new passion is Amateur Radio, I want to see what signals are in the ether. I’m not talking WiFi or mobile phone, but real signals from real people. You don’t get any more real than our friend in the big red suit that goes by so many names: Per Noel, Santa Claus, Sinte Klaas, Father Christmas, Old Saint... Read More

I have been interested in ham (amateur) radio for as long as I can remember. Before the days of internet being available to anyone in their own homes the idea of being able to talk with people from anywhere in the world – and beyond – has always held massive appeal to me. As a teenager I dabbled a little... Read More

Somehow my top bar in Ubuntu Linux had multiple icons for the same program and I could not remove them. Right clicking did nothing, left clicking started the program, Shift-dragging made duplicates of the icon, Ctrl-dragging did nothing useful. There is a solution. Use the Super key (on PC keyboards it is also known as the Windows key) and Alt... Read More

If like me you run a WordPress site you may have come across an issue where going to wp-admin/plugin-install.php and clicked on ‘More Details’ results in a blank iframe in the middle of the screen. The issue is caused by XSS (cross site scripting) protection and is fixable. You need to add the header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN In nginx the change... Read More

I have a monitor with a bunch of dead pixels at the left hand side and the bottom affecting maybe 5% of the screen. Rather than throw the monitor away I usually change the underscan so I can skip the dead pixels. Ubuntu 16.04 decided that it would no longer play nice with the official AMD drivers for my graphics... Read More

This is a quick howto on using curl, wget or any other web based method to pass data to a Particle (formerly Spark) Core, Photon or Electron. Prerequisites: working Particle device as listed above software on the device waiting for user passed data The device’s access token A simple code example which exports a function is below. int ledPin =... Read More

I recently had an error on a website giving me a 404 on BBP Style Pack bspstyle.css in WordPress. Others have had the same issue. To resolve the issue, visit the wp-admin section wp-admin/options-general.php?page=bbp-style-pack&tab=forums_index_styling Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “Save changes” which will create the file automatically. If that helps, please consider clicking on one of... Read More

Over the past couple of days my site has been offline as I have been optimising it. I have installed: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS 64 bit MariaDB rather than Mysql database server Nginx web server The site definitely feels more responsive to me but that is purely subjective. I have tried doing speed tests but they vary even between page refreshes.... Read More

If you are behind the enforced Turkey national firewall visit http://use.opendns.com for easy to follow instructions on how to bypass it. Be safe, and let people know that you are safe. Spread the word. Read More